Barack Obama is a basketball aficionado who likes to say that games are often decided in the fourth quarter. And today, midway through the last quarter of his presidency, Obama has no intention of running out the clock; instead he’s putting on a full-court press for a bold and historic legacy. “We wanna squeeze every possibility to do some good” before the buzzer, the president likes to say. He started off 2016 on Tuesday with another such effort, tearing up in public over an issue that aides say marks his biggest frustration in office: his failure to persuade Congress to do anything about the easy availability of guns. At a White House news conference, Obama paused, seemingly overcome with emotion, as he invoked the first-graders who lost their lives at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012; and then he bypassed Congress yet again in announcing a series of new executive actions on gun violence.

No one around the White House openly uses use the “L word”, which the president himself avoids, but his administration is clearly playing to history. Senior adviser Shailagh Murray (a former journalist, now in the job once held by David Axelrod and Dan Pfeiffer) heads a strategic messaging process aimed at “intense storytelling on different platforms” as communications aides schedule 2016 events that integrate the long Obama record into –buzzword alert!—a narrative of the larger themes of his presidency.

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The story his staff wants to tell is a work-in-progress but, according to a senior aide, it features a fearless and decisive president who combined restraint with unheralded risk-taking as he prevailed over uncompromising Republican obstructionists and doubters in his own party to rescue the economy from its gravest crisis since the Great Depression, provide historic health security and prepare for the future with farsighted if controversial policies on climate change, nuclear proliferation and more, all the while inspiring young people to serve their communities and their country.

Will Obama and his advocates be able to sell this narrative? The cool customer long known as “No-Drama Obama” is an unusual combination of control freak and fatalist—tirelessly working to fix what he can, while simultaneously surrendering himself to the whims of historical judgment, which he knows he can’t control. “If we keep delivering,” he tells his staff, “history will write itself.”

In the meantime, he’ll settle for some ghostwriting. Obama these days brags more about his accomplishments and is channeling his inner liberal and placating long-disappointed progressive supporters by moving leftward on issues such as climate (imposing tough Environmental Protection Agency regulations on coal-fired plants and canceling the Keystone XL pipeline), workers’ rights (raising the minimum wage for federal contractors) and foreign policy (resisting pressure to use ground troops against ISIL, normalizing relations with Cuba and leaving the door open to defying Congress and closing the prison at Guantánamo Bay unilaterally).

After a mostly strong 2015 that saw him buoyed by a recovering economy, Obama has finished the year sounding tone-deaf to the fears of Americans in the wake of the Paris and San Bernardino radical jihadist attacks. He risks looking fatalistic and unimaginative on what will likely be the biggest blemish on his foreign policy record: the rise of the Islamic State and an imploding Middle East.

This week, Obama invoked the Sandy Hook shooting when he made an effort to tackle “one piece of unfinished business” with new executive actions on guns. Above, he speaks at the White House in April 2013 alongside families of Sandy Hook victims and former Rep. Gabby Giffords. | AP Photo

And it may be a long time before a truly balanced historical judgment on Obama’s tenure carries any weight. He has served as president during a time of what political scientists call “asymmetrical polarization,” where one political party (the Republicans) has moved further away from the center—as defined by polls—than the other. But now Democrats are becoming more liberal (with a socialist as a viable candidate for president) and the emergence of Donald Trump has turned the 2016 campaign into a peculiar stew of recrimination.

This raises chances that even historical memory will be heavily politicized. The mere mention of Obama’s name—like Franklin D. Roosevelt’s in the 1930s—is often enough to start an argument at the dinner table. Americans are likely to describe him in such starkly different terms that they might as well be referring to two entirely separate people and presidents instead of one.

Democrats will tend to say he brought wise, scandal-free, and often inspiring leadership, symbolized, perhaps, by his moving rendition of “Amazing Grace” at a memorial service in Charleston, South Carolina, after a white supremacist opened fire in a church. Republicans will often deride him as an arrogant left-wing Big Government ideologue—simultaneously too assertive at home (e.g. Obamacare) and too passive abroad (e.g. ISIL).

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I’ve written two books about the Obama presidency and have noticed an unusual tempo to his game: up-tempo in the first quarter when he teamed with the Democratic Congress to save the financial system and push through a huge stimulus, the Affordable Care Act and Dodd-Frank financial reform; down in the middle two quarters when he continued to put some points on the board (including killing Osama bin Laden, protecting young immigrant “Dreamers” from deportation and getting handily reelected) but delayed an aggressive jobs agenda in a futile bid for a “grand bargain” on deficit reduction and suffered too many political turnovers to the GOP; and a see-saw struggle in the fourth quarter as he aggressively uses executive orders to drive change without the Republican Congress but has lost public support that he is protecting the country from terrorism. His basketball friends tell me that on the court (a rarity these days), he passes generously but still always wants the ball with the game on the line.

Obama’s calmly self-confident line—“I got this"—may come closest to summarizing his view of his place in the world. His inner circle fervently believes that he does generally have things in hand—that whatever happens in 2016, his legacy is already secure.

Obama’s calmly self-confident line—“I got this”—may come closest to summarizing his view of his place in the world.

But is it? According to FiveThirtyEight’s composite average of surveys of historians assessing presidential performance, Barack Obama currently ranks 17th out of 44 presidents, sandwiched between John Adams and Bill Clinton. Of course these rankings are imprecise and they often fluctuate wildly over time. Harry Truman left office in 1953 in the bottom half of the pack and is now ranked sixth. Woodrow Wilson, currently No. 7, is bound to move lower after the recent attention to the racist parts of his record. Obama believes that in today’s hyperpartisan climate, his legacy is unusually dependent on whether a Democrat cements it by succeeding him as president. A Republican, he knows, will dismantle much of what he has built.

Some Obama legacy issues are already settled. On the most obvious level, the grandson of a Kenyan goat-herder will always have a place of pride in history just for becoming the first African-American to reach the White House, which was built in the 1790s mostly by slaves and immigrants.

Obama’s post-presidency will be closely connected to this achievement. He has vowed to harness his millions of supporters for civic engagement and to make it “a mission for the rest of my life” to help young men of color succeed. According to aides, Obama is haunted by the early, violent death of so many young black men, and by the larger toll of gun violence in America. Obama himself says his lowest moment in seven years was the day he shed tears with the families of the 20 children massacred at Sandy Hook, their bodies still laid out in a makeshift morgue nearby.